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For a Real Tennis Match, Look to Prince Edward

Who is the biggest name in the tennis world? That is easy: Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex and the fourth child of Queen Elizabeth II. He plays tennis regularly, at Queen’s Club in London, off a handicap of 40 (a low B player, in other words) and is the active patron of the Tennis & Rackets Association, which governs the game of tennis in Great Britain. And the prince is brave enough to take a stab here at explaining the origins of tennis’s scoring system.

But wait, this isn’t tennis, you say. Well, it is the original game of tennis, the game from which the tennis you know was invented in the 1870s. It is an indoor game, played with wooden racquets and it is called “real tennis” in the U.K. and Australia, “court tennis” in the States, and “jeu de paume” in France. (Just for scale: there are nine courts and 700 players in the U.S. )

The best way to unravel the history of tennis is to watch *Origins of the Game,*a new one-hour documentary. The film premiered three weeks ago, and the Tennis Channel is screening it on Sunday, October 18, at 6pm. The director, Bailey Pryor, is not a real tennis player and has produced a half dozen Warren Miller skiing films, in addition to TV movies, Nike commercials, and travel specials, so the film is anything but an insidery, station-to-station grind. There’s goofy animation, gorgeous archival prints, reenactments that don’t remind you of *Monty Python,*and Bud Collins in a trademark brightly striped shirt. And some lovely diegesis from Prince Edward.

Pryor buys into the legend of Henry VIII playing tennis when he received word of Anne Boleyn’s execution—colorful but not true—but he gets a lot of the story right.

Tennis is the oldest ball game. Pryor dates it back to ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. It emerged in the form we know it in the 12th century, when French monks co-opted a common street game and brought it into their courtyards. Yet the racquet was not invented until the 16th century. So what did a tennis court look like for four centuries when players used their hands to smack the ball?

It looked like an elaborate game of handball. You can see the world’s only playable example if you sail into the sleepy Connecticut village of Noank, just a seagull’s call away from Mystic. At Pyror’s offices in an old vaudeville theater, he’s erected a proper 15th century tennis court. It is 32 by 28 feet, made of wood, and has all the galleries, penthouses, and tambours of the standard real tennis court, only at about a third the size. The net is a rope with tassels hanging down—an actual net was not customary in medieval days.

To get as authentic as possible, he stitched dark leather around a tennis ball, rented costumes from the Metropolitan Opera (via a local playhouse), and hired two court tennis pros from the Newport Casino, Rich Smith and Tony Hollins, to come down and play on camera. They are both from Seacourt, an English club that has five racquet sports under one roof, so they thought playing 15th century tennis would be easy.

“Bailey said, ‘Can you just rally back and forth for the camera?’ and we said, ‘No problem,’” remembered Smith. “And then we tried and, hang on, this was hard, this was very hard.” Smith, the head pro at Newport, played Louis XI in the film while Hollins portrayed his ballmaking servant.

Last month I went out on the Noank court with Finn Pryor, Bailey’s ten year-old son, and had a whack at it. It felt unnatural to not have a big stick in my hand and more than once I just missed the ball. Finn, by now an old hand at 15th century tennis, hopped around the court with glee.